SWAP/meet: Where Older Critics Greet Younger Artists
By Sue Spaid, Philadelphia-based Curator and Philosophy Professor, Temple UniversityGeneralizing Generations
One of the events I most look forward to is the emergence of the next generation’s art with its new rules, values, interests, preferences, pleasures, strategies, goals, etc. It usually arises as a huge confusion, with lots of stuff going on and multiple references. Sorting it out, let alone conceptualizing it, is never an easy task. Once the related music and fashion trends take hold, the dust begins to settle. Something clicks and the immense mess makes sense. Over the past two decades, I have witnessed and cycled through several waves, which crest more frequently than a typical 20 year span: Neo-Geo/Photo-Text (artist’s strategy: resistance; audience response: gobbled up), Slacker Art (strategy: uncertainty; response: foul); Minimalism with a Message (strategy: reassurance; response: respect), Figuration (strategy: recognition; response: hope), Portraiture (strategy: revelation; response: indifference), Participatory Art (strategy: democracy; response: apathy); Sprawls (strategy: disorder; response: dismay), Landscapes (strategy: forewarn; response: adored), and more recently, conceptual art’s revival (strategy: challenge; response: ambivalence). FYI: public reactions rarely dovetail with generational goals.
What kind of goals can an emergent generation be said to engender? Who speaks for whom? And who frames this agenda—the artists, their curators or some anonymous press? It’s difficult enough to grasp how millions of voices get generalized as some generational attitude. Truth be told, human beings need to think they have a handle on what’s happening, however temporary the scheme. Art critics are perhaps the worst offenders… Even those of us who refuse to have the last say must still write as if our words matter most. While we hope to inspire alternative perspectives, we often influence people’s interpretations more than we care to admit. What is one to do? Stop writing altogether? One strategy is to take on so many conflicting positions that readers never know where you’re coming from or where you’re heading. Is an unpredictable, contradictory critic more fair-minded, simply confused or professionally negligent?
Having spent fifteen years working in graduate art programs, I must confess that the luckiest students were those who were the angriest. Perceiving the artworld as forbidding whatever art they so desperately craved, they directed their fury squarely at the artworld. Denied access to the artworld’s ledger, they were free to disparage the art they detested and to imagine some ideal, perfect art. Their anger helped them negotiate our horribly boring, banal artworld. Ever since congeniality became de rigueur, angry artists have all but disappeared. Perhaps they’ve been pacified by the exponential growth of grassroots spaces and collectors treating emerging art like penny stocks. We can only hope that it’s not long before spouting off one’s opinions fails to increase one’s chances of facing exclusion.
It’s both a blessing and a curse that younger artists have an easier time locating their place in the artworld. No one balks anymore if as painters we’re also feminist or gay or Latino or rich or drug addicts or mothers or realists or really dull. Those who have been socialized to be non-confrontational find greater acceptance, but they may also find it too chancy to champion whatever they admire. With our reactions so numbed, what are we to do? Who is our guru? Of course, I don’t have any helpful answers, though I must say that amiability, especially in the artworld, is deeply disconcerting. It makes one feel watched, judged, and obligated to follow alien values. Let’s take for example older feminists who find it impossible to tolerate the way younger women exploit female bodies in their art. Even so, it’s senseless for them to condemn younger artists for such antics, since this presumes that later generations are bound to an earlier generation’s values. Understanding lies midway between toleration and indignation. Rather than hold younger artists accountable to my values, I try to step back and wonder why this is happening now. Alas, female exploitation has subsided, but I yearn for an angry artist parade!
The RISD Crew
As an art critic, the most natural way to discuss 37 works by 20 painters would be to lump related works together stylistically, under the rubric of a handful of recognizable categories (figurative/abstract, minimal/maximal, paint/non, thick/thin, opaque/layered, or aerialist/point perspective). Since most painters exhibited only one work, this strategy seems insincere. One cannot generalize about a singular work, anymore than a singular voice! Not knowing the artists’ works, I can’t discern whether a work is endemic of his/her oeuvre, the most well received work to date, or representative of some passing phase. One senses the view that “paint can save the day.” I feel this crew’s deep commitment to paint’s haptic sensoriality—its phenomenological qualities—a fluid liquidity that evokes veiling, layering, atmosphere, drizzle, drips, moisture, mood, weather, melt-downs, washes, crushes, and capacious space, twisting and turning on an infinity of axes. For the most part, these active paint pushers are exploring the range of painting’s possibilities. In light of recent attention to drawing, such painterliness feels fresh!
So, how does one generalize about a particular category, when it’s only accidental (or hubris) that a work “exemplifies” one side of some binary. I would love to have received their list of interests, with hopes of recognizing which underlying references influence their efforts. I could then employ their own categories to frame their works, though I’d still be apt to misjudge. It’s vaguely amusing that three works contain stereotypical RISD rainbow motifs, however unconsciously. Stranger still are randomly appearing lips? In an attempt to remain open, I’m proceeding alphabetically by first name, a direction that might influence my responses. I have no choice but to casually record my reaction to their works and then see whether any strands run through this particular group. Don’t artists crave feedback?
Blade Wynne’s diptych Orbit (2007) pairs two paintings: a masked face vomiting a rainbow and an odd 3-D object, which falls somewhere between a puzzle awaiting disassembly and a corporate logo of a fictive french-fry/match company. Made from colored-foam sheeting, Cassie Jones’ Dr. Seuss-inspired untitled work (2007) connecting the floor to wall (a rainbow of sorts) and painting entitled Stem (2006) seem rebellious in this context! Despite their simplicity, her nine graphic geometric acrylic drawings have a presence. One of the bolder, more humorous works is David Bae’s oil painting I hoped to have been published by now (2007). Although the word “published” seems out of place, one can only imagine that this artist is mimicking David Eggers’ strategy from A Heartbreaking Novel of Staggering Genius (2000). His extremely painterly painting embraces the viewer, who now experiences living inside an aquarium or surviving a massive storm aboard a sinking ship at sea. The central image of Ginny Casey’s Finger Trap (2007) recalls Ken Price’s ceramic sculptures, but her pod-like structure is pocked with finger-size holes and spins as a celestial orb through multiple galaxies. Only 15 years ago, such imagery would have been typed as core feminine imagery, a kind of vagina-sprouting blob!
Heather McPherson’s untitled oil painting from 2006 features a large rustic, copper cauldron floating amidst an intensely dark, musty teal, mauve landscape, peppered with multiple perspectives, including an aerial view of farmland. Being a huge fan of demolition derby and dinner parties, I easily related to Jacob Goble’s humorous derby (2006) and table (2007) paintings. Connecting two otherwise disparate activities, derby cars are awash in some pink ooze possibly resulting from firefighters quelling a car fire with foamy retardant or some sink-hole-like ground-swell, while eaters dine awash in some creamy ooze, making some seem entranced in a séance. Towing the cartoon abstraction line (painters like Carroll Dunham, Mark Dean Veca, Paul Henry Ramirez, and Inka Essenhigh), Jeannette Hernandez’s Squales (2006) takes its cues from cartoon “poof” imagery and Popeye’s curlicue muscles. By squeezing such imagery within a small frame, her painting evokes a Jack-in-the-box awaiting eruption. Seemingly inspired by pop-era op art and super graphics, John Fasano’s super bright untitled (2006) resonates on one’s retina, leaving one to experience an enormous “E”-shaped logo bounce from a cube.
Given Jonas Criscoe’s serial silk-screened drawings of graffitied store-fronts, one scours the five Plexiglas plates, as if they were newspaper puzzles, eager to discern those details that individuate each identical image. Exhibiting three very different approaches, Jonathan Edwards appears to be this crew’s most productive. His remarkably popular etching Man Wrestling a Bear (2006) rather suggests man seducing a bear, while his somewhat “dry” twin silkscreens feature different 19th Century scenes. Ol’ Jim (2006) features a scraggly cowboy sporting a fluffy, though inside-out, shearling coat and a circular pin stating “The Overman is Joyful.” The white imagery in Katherine Mangiardi’s untitled painting from 2006 dramatically pulse and sway to silence. While there are no direct references, this imagery recalls decorative lace, intricate arteries, complex branching, and knobby vines all vying in outer space as they originate and rotate from dozens of perspectives. The first thing that sprung to my mind when I saw Kaveri Nair’s Ski Lift (2006) was sculptor Yutake Sone’s similar paintings, so when I heard that she lifted this image from the internet I thought it might be his, until I discovered that his paintings don’t yet exist on the net. Still, her employing unreality to construct possibility amused me. The ski lift’s cables float in the air totally detached from their towers, while the surrounding snowy trees are in the midst of a total melt-down (a global warming warning?), leaving the viewer feeling sorry for these skiers’ doomed adventure.
One already senses this crew’s preference for found imagery. If not culled directly from magazine imagery, Laura Braciale borrows that familiar style. Featuring a scraggy spherical sculpture sited on a Noguchi-like glass table, Design within Reach (2006) is particularly compelling. Initially resembling an ordinary frontal view, familiar to magazine photography, one suddenly recognizes the table base’s super-skewed perspective. By totally exaggerating light cascading against ‘60s era bathroom tiles, Shower Scene (2006) mimics color gradation exercises from light pink to mauve via thistle! One of two who eschew paint, Maryam Molki's elegant Explosion (2007) juxtaposes intricately cut curls and coils against hand-torn papers. Working from video stills, Matt Bollinger’s intimate paintings slowly intimate situations drawn from his personal life, including a misty kitchen scene of a woman gripping her belly, a woman doused with either the TV set’s blue glow or a fog of cigarette smoke, and the same woman engaged in bedside consultations. Another trend is the simultaneity of multiple perspectives, an approach Meghan Calhoun's untitled paintings (2006) explore in spades. Calhoun’s three paintings propose three planes. Planar objects, displayed frontally with their shadow-like/spirit forms floating at various angles in space, rest against a background of horizontal degradations.
While a cursory glance at Nadia Ayari’s Reelection (2006) recalls Philip Guston’s satirical cartoons, compositional style, and/or brushstroke, one soon realizes that her super-modeled figures and subject matter are all her own. Ayari’s rigorously rendered chicken (“W”?) appears squashed in the grips of an anonymous hand (the corporate puppet masters?), while the chicken cage is stuffed to the gills with detached fingers (the dismembered electorate?). Despite Niki Kriese’s apparent anti-paint rebellion, the “painting can save the day” theme continues. Poles (2007) repeats the tension present in her two untitled photographs (2007), as red string strung between two taut poles insinuates the counter-promise that the crews’ paintings’ drips and sprays preserve. The most visually intense paintings are Ricky Allman’s urban landscapes, like a bunch of stuff coming out of the back of a church (2007). Layer upon layer of visible and otherwise invisible architectural elements explode and implode to reveal these imaginary cities’ extreme variety of chaotic activities. A signature rainbow flowing from a building onto the ground punctuates his Different doom, happier children (2007). With titles like different kinds of love (all 2006), one might expect Ziad Naccache’s three geometric paintings to elicit positions such as “69,” hugging, and penetration, and they do. Since he’s Lebanese, his coded imagery hidden within the convention of abstraction tends to upend Islam’s taboos against figuration.
SWAP/Meet: The Tyler School
By Maya Allison, Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art, The RISD MuseumGeneralizing Generations
When Tyler and RISD decided to “swap” students for the exhibition “SWAP/meet,” it gave members of the RISD community a chance to see what Tyler students are up to, and some perspective on how a group of painting students might have an identity as a cohort. Looking around the room at the Tyler exhibition, one is reminded of looking at a stranger’s yearbook: each painting is a snapshot of the artist’s character and vision. Who shares a cafeteria table, so to speak, and who eats alone? Perhaps the most straightforward way to group them is as figurative versus abstract, or painterly versus mannered.
Heading up the figurative, mannered category is Mayumi Nagayama’s enormous canvas Burying (2006), a stylized meditation on a cartoon-like figure at work. The figure repeats five times, receding into the distance, giving depth to an otherwise flattened, camouflage-like composition, a landscape rendered in bright pastel colors. There is something eerie at work here, the primal work of digging in the dirt with ones hands suggests a serious activity, repeating in each figure, for narrative or symbolic effect. The limited palette – two shades of around 4 pastel colors – used for sky and ground feels child-like and playful, yet faintly unsettling in combinations like Pepto-Bismol pink and Jolly Rancher green-apple.
Benny Fountain also experiments with a limited palette for rendering landscape in Looking and Painting While Standing on Back Porch (2007). Much more painterly in style, he works with naturalistic colors ranging from muted yellow to wine red, he captures landscape in broad, loose lines and dabs of yellow light. A hint of detail in a tree trunk and a cottage anchor an otherwise shifting, impressionistic scene: it could be autumn, with the warm earthy colors on the ground, or winter, with bare tree limbs. The lines of the trees and porch radiate out from the lower third of the composition, as if engulfing the viewer in a gust of autumn weather. As his title and the unfinished edges of the composition suggest, this painting feels like a moment when he worked quickly and expressively to capture the sensation of the landscape in one of many moods, and stopped painting when the moment shifted.
Vincent Balistrieri composes mysterious scenes from simply-painted, solid forms. In both Totemly (2007) and Bunkerly (2006), the viewer is directed to a single gesture in progress, framed by a distant, ominous sky. In the case of Totemly, a shirtless man in red gloves stretches a yellow line of rope between his hands, while in the distance a figure with a headband is tied to a tree, facing a totem of sorts –a game of Cowboys and Indians, a strange boxing ritual, or a human sacrifice underway? Bunkerly has less narrative but verges on Magritte-surrealism, where exterior and interior switch roles, and an outsized pair of hands points through the threshold toward craters in the grass.
Christopher Hall’s exuberant collage paintings draw from a tradition of caricature and comic art, as well as from “outsider” and “folk art” styles. In Cyclops Santa (2006), Hall’s scribbly pencil underdrawing and coloring “outside the lines” express the child-like excitement at work in this scene – Santa Claus, but he’s a Cyclops! And he has to fight Godzilla! Likewise with Monomaniac 3, a Captain Ahab character from Moby Dick is rendered in simple collage shapes full of exuberant gusto.
Rick Ulysse’s Superman and Cassius Clay (both 2006) cut-out collages are more subdued, working from black and white photos. They both deal with notions of masculine strength as embodied in “men of steel” from popular culture. Cassius Clay is Mohammed Ali’s birth name, represented here as a gloved fist and a grimacing jaw, cropped at the nose. The image is hung so he seems to lie on his side, as if knocked out. Only his mouth and arm are visible, yet this has enough visual energy to convey the punch of the fighter’s gesture. Superman incorporates another boxing torso, within a cut-out face and collar of a man. Here only his eyes are visible, with eyebrows raised in comic shock. With a Dadaist sense of visual language, it produces a visual pun for Superman, or man of power.
The golden-yellow paint of Corey Antis’s Untitled (2006) moves through geometric forms to suggest an architectural landscape, at once figurative and abstract. A scale model emerges from a few gray rectangles, black lines, and just the barest of 3-point perspective. Wide yellow brush strokes lead the eye through and around the forms to imagine the patios and entryways of a future residence. Yet the artist withholds detail, the scale is not confirmed: it is only geometry. With minimal lines and unfinished edges, the painting hovers between concrete and abstract, floating in white space.
Although abstract painting in the strict sense, Jonathan Allmaier uses paint in a way that recalls Japanese calligraphy technique: in Untitled (2006) the paint sweeps across the canvas in dense layers of red, tapering until the last of each brush stroke gives way to the white underpainting. Fields of white emerge in the center and at top, giving spatial depth to the red fields of texture, saturation, and gesture. A few single strokes of black paint anchor the composition and heighten the overall calligraphic effect.
In 3:50 (2006) blue blocks of paint slide across the canvas, with a windswept effect that is more liquid than calligraphic. Ryan McCartney uses the pressure of the brush to create fields of deep blue tapering to soft, blended borders of white. Every movement is horizontal and even unidirectional, while retaining a distinct gestural quality. The paint here is luxurious and sensual, suggesting a play of light on water, and inviting the viewer to immerse himself in its movement.
Rachel Dobkin sprinkled and smeared Comet brand cleanser on a background of black paint to create a starry effect in Comet (2007). Vibrant orange stripes at the right and left edges render the composition dynamic: five “comets” explode against a black ground that ripples and feathers out into the orange periphery. Dobkin’s second painting, Walking Through (2007) reads like an impressionistic atlas of the world, as seen through a watery lens. Grids melt into fields of rusty orange. A few blue dotted lines at the top orient the image in space. Diagram-like, the brush strokes contrast against the soak-stained effect of the overall composition.
Brett John Johnson uses spots of light and movement against a black ground, but in video form, in Untitled (2007). The deep black of the space disorients the viewer, while spots of light move across the screen. With the sound of cars, it becomes clear that it is a highway at night, a dreamy, reflective space perhaps associated with imagined travels and night solitude. Johnson built a free-standing wood frame, painted white, to suspend the projection fabric, reinforcing the work’s role as a painting made with light.
Jahjahen Bath Ives works with girlish swags and draping as a trope in Kick It and It’s a Girl (both 2007). In both cases a net of curling, looping yarn tumbles from the wall to the floor. In Kick It, yarn in soft yellows, blues and green stretches across and beyond the bounds of a canvas. A white grid of yarn suggests a net, perhaps referring to the title, and a single white strand trails to the floor, as if knitting was interrupted for a daydream. In It’s a Girl a pink shower curtain is in ribbons, intertwined with looping white yarn, textures that both suggest domestic, feminine space.
In Erin Arnold’s lavish True Romance (2006), swags and flourishes, flowers and curlicues, have been painted to canopy an enormous expanse of canvas. The center table suggests a girl’s vanity table. Text is everywhere, shifting in and out of location. The words “The Cosmic Connection Sure As Anything” float over a magazine on the floor entitled “Seeing Stars.” Star shapes appear in a vase on the floor, and in the vanity mirror a starry night reflects back the faces of two mannequin heads on the table. Next to them an open magazine depicting faces and a heart hangs from the table’s edge. A potted plant and hovering doves might be a mural or a veranda – this is a place of rampant imagination more than representation. Romance is at its most pre-teen girl here, in pink pastels, baby blue, and soft warm yellow.
The paintings here demonstrate a freedom to experiment with media and content. While a few stray from paint on canvas as a format, they are each in conversation with the notion of a frame and the imagined space it delineates. The work ranges from figurative to abstract, but shares an interest in movement. With a few possible exceptions, there is little sense here of purely formal concerns. Seductive, loose, and expressive gestures prevail, yet even the most stylized work responds to an acute awareness of the two-dimensional canvas plane.